David Inoue
In case you aren’t familiar with being “In the room where it happens,” I must say you are even more out of touch with current pop culture than me. You’re probably more familiar with my references to 1980s pop culture rather than the musical phenomenon of “Hamilton.”
During the first Trump administration, or Trump 45, the musical “Hamilton” became well known as the creative resistance to the administration. Shortly after the election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence went to see “Hamilton” in New York City, but the cast, recognizing his presence in the audience, offered some off-script words at the end of the performance, calling on the administration to recognize the humanity of the immigrants portrayed in the play and making up the cast that performed that night.
The reaction from President-elect Donald Trump was a demand that the cast apologize for how it treated the vice president-elect. The demand for respect for Pence seems incredibly ironic given the reaction after the mob that sought to hang Mr. Pence in the wake of his certification of President-elect Joe Biden just over four years later.
Now another four years later, we find ourselves once again with President Trump targeting immigrants, transgender women and the very government that he is sworn to lead. And we find ourselves searching even more for a resistance, if even some way to simply slow down the breakneck pace with which conventional norms are being torn down or simply ignored.
JACL is offering up some of that needed resistance to policies we find especially offensive and contrary to long-held values of justice and fairness, especially poignant because of our community’s history, both during World War II and in the years before and since. We recognize that what happened during the war was a continuation of discrimination that had been building for years and continued in differing forms through the recent anti-Asian hate crimes due to Covid-19 scapegoating.
There is a lot happening now. The president has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target Venezuelan citizens in the United States without due process, just as Japanese, Germans and Italians were similarly imprisoned during WWII, and through Executive Order 9066, American citizens were also similarly detained and imprisoned without trial or legitimate suspicion of wrongdoing, only a connection through nation of ancestry. Perhaps even more egregious this time around is the fact that we are not even at war with Venezuela, seemingly one of the prerequisites of implementing the Alien Enemies Act.
As mentioned, the federal government is being dismantled, jeopardizing fundamental public services such as protecting the basic rights to public education for all American children. Perhaps more personal to the Japanese American community, cuts to the National Park Service threaten the maintenance and availability of National Historic Sites such as Manzanar, Minidoka and Bainbridge Island. These sites are integral to members of our community finding opportunities to heal the wounds from the trauma of incarceration. We also use these sites to educate the public about our history of incarceration and instill the hope that we will not repeat the same mistakes, even as we seem to be doing so today.
But these are not new concerns for us. If you recall back to some recent conventions, you would recall an impassioned speech from Mike Honda for why JACL must take up the lead in pushing for the repeal of the Alien Enemies Act. You would see a meeting of the JACS consortium in parallel to our National Council meetings, with shared workshops and engagement from the NPS to highlight JACL’s importance in promoting historic preservation. Just as we affirmed our support for gay marriage over 30 years ago, two years ago we affirmed our support for transgender and nonbinary people.
I sometimes hear from our members that they are not happy with a position JACL has taken. I often refer these “complaints” to our board and National Council resolutions that set our national policy direction. While we won’t be having a National Council session this year in Albuquerque, we will be having plenary and workshop sessions to tackle and discuss the many challenges facing JACL and our country today.
We will wrestle with how to stem the growing tide against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and how to change the narrative to match popular sentiment in support of such values. We will learn about the ways in which transgender people are targeted and made to feel less than others through sports and bathroom bans and what we can be doing to fight back. We will recognize our community’s dark history with the Alien Enemies Act and strategize how chapters and members can work together to move toward passage of a full repeal of this anachronistic law.
We will do all of this and so much more at this year’s JACL National Convention, “Voices in Unity.” We want to hear your voice in Albuquerque, and hopefully with all of our voices together in the room where it happens, JACL will continue to be a leader in promoting a more just and moral nation. Together, we can make it happen.
To register for this year’s convention and for more information, please visit the JACL website at jacl.org.
David Inoue is executive director of the JACL. He is based in the organization’s Washington, D.C., office. Click here to read past columns.
